My biological siblings and I grew up with Scandinavian and Scots-Irish heritage. I cannot say it meant much to me. I did enjoy the sound of the bagpipes, but I did not like the food of either, nor the grave paranoia of the former, or the embrace of drunkenness and playing the fool, reliance on luck, etc. of the latter. I’ve never thought “I want to visit Ireland, or Scotland” etc. The person I knew as my grandfather, Edgar, seemed like he didn’t care about us, or himself very much either. He left this world, passing on a powder blue 1989 Ford Escort as the only significant material possession or thing of value to his “only surviving son” Kyle, as Ron passed from complications with pneumonia in 1984.

I remember riding in that car with my oldest sister. She was a rock, in more ways than one. Incredibly patient, there was a stoicism to her that should make people envious. She was constantly cooking, she enjoyed making cheese from scratch, milking goats, caring for animals, reading, she was constantly reading. She did not really appear to care much for her heritage either. She had “pen pals” from Britain, Egypt, among others. She’d get sent food items from Egypt and the Mediterranean in the mail, and this back in the ‘90s, when the online infrastructure for such things did not yet exist. She would make spanakopita, baklava, and other Greek and Mediterranean dishes from scratch. Especially at Easter, but on other occasions as well, she would make what was called “Greek lamb” by my family, and this was my favorite dish. Seasoning meat a certain way might not be that out of the ordinary, but to date, I have never met another family of Scandinavian and Scots-Irish descent, a member of whom would make food items such as spanakopita or baklava from scratch.

It wasn’t until I was 28 years old that I really started looking into my family history. Covid had turned all of us on each other to some degree or another. It increased our collective isolation from each other. I think in some ways to feel a sense of connection, and because the last two girls I’d dated had an interest in my heritage, as their own was certainly something they identified with, and I wanted a better answer. One of these women was of Italian descent, her grandfather I later learned had emigrated from Puglia in the ‘20s, and she would mock me for my interest in Italy, which was evident because I’d slowly over many years adopted some mannerisms, such as the “che cosa vuoi?” gesture instead of flipping people off, or slipping into a tribute/parody of the Italian-American accent, and I had a few clothing items, shirts, jackets, that read “Italia” on them. For years I had inadvertently dressed in a bit of an ode to Italian-American fashion, purely out of obliviousness, not intentionally by any stretch.

I had recently reconnected to some degree with my adoptive family. My adoptive father had apologized, years later, for threats of, and then actually going through with, disowning me. So at the invite of attending a kind of family reunion event, I went to see them all again for the first time in years. They were very much themselves, which was good for them, there was certainly less “eggshell walking”. And their German heritage collectively meant quite a bit to them, this was obvious. The second oldest son in their family had married a German woman and moved to Koln, and he and his children took pride in speaking the language. I wished my family and the people and place they came from meant something like that to me.

That was September of ‘21, also the first time I’d been in college again since the fall of ‘13. Covid struck those of us in the service industry pretty hard. I had to face the reality that I would never have a stable career until I sought completion of some higher education. So I re-enrolled for microbiology.

Basically as soon as I returned from that family reunion event, I started looking into my own family history, following the threads, or so called “roots” as so many call their ancestors and who they would procreate with. Who married who? Whose parents were whose? Where did the main branches emigrate from? What did they do for work? And checking the data over and over to be sure I had dates correct, obituaries correct, marriage certificates correct, census data correct, tax data correct, military cards correct, and on and on. It did not occur to me to take a DNA test until after talking with my oldest brother Jason, who I hadn’t seen in years either, and hearing him express the sentiment, after showing him a picture of a cousin who was easily the most successful person in our greater family tree, “he looks nothing like us”. This cousin was a doctor who had contributed research to treating a specific kind of cancer, and who had even been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1966.

My siblings and I had heard over and over, some variation of the phrase “You certainly don’t tan like Irish!”, or that we were pretty dark for people of “Irish” descent, never had to wear sunblock to avoid sunburn etc. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, but my brother’s words got me thinking, I should make sure that the lines I’m tracing are actually representative of the people I came from to begin with.

I was busy with school, but I did happen to see some ad somewhere for a DNA test, which happened to be significantly discounted for the holiday season coming up. So I ordered one, and waited patiently for six weeks, really not expecting anything interesting.

When I finally got the results, I saw about a quarter of my DNA came not from Germany, Scandinavia, or the British Isles like the rest, and like what I was expecting, but instead, from Romania and Greece.

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It is accepted by most historians that the entirety of southeastern Europe was Latinized before the Slavic breach of the Danube in the 7th century, and therefore the Romanians and Latin-Greeks or Aromanians have a common cultural inheritance10. Indeed, they were both historically referred to vaguely as “Wallachs” or “Vlachs” with significant crossover and although concentrated in NW Greece and what is now Romania, were seen as having little difference until about the time of the Ottoman era, while some 40% of the Aromanian language is mutually intelligible with Romanian10.

The name “Aromanian” has an example of an epenthetic vowel, an incidental vowel that due to the interchange with the surrounding languages over time, comes to be included with the descriptive word. In this case, it would be similar to someone saying “I’m a Romanian” when asked what group of people they belong to, and over time, this answer comes to be “I’m Aromanian”.

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To the best of my knowledge, my great great great great great (that's 5 greats) grandfather Eneas Zafeiris was born in or near Krania, Elassona, Thessaly, Greece in about 1775 (the best representation in English, though the last name could have been spelled somewhat differently, and certainly in the Greek script, as this is a transliteration into the Latin alphabet. Most Aromanians have historically been at least bilingual for hundreds of years anyways, meaning there can be subtle linguistic differences that can be represented in the names. Any difference would be meaningless to an American, and only be telling to someone from Greece as to where and with what people group the person originated). Records for this time and place are not great, which means reliance on oral tradition and individual family records, rather than various church or state records, have to be relied on. He had a son named Alexandros, and Alexandros had a son named Theodorache in Romanian, Theodorakis in Greek, and Theodorache’s son Grigore is attested as being born in Bujoreni, Valcea, Wallachia, Romania in 1867.

Grigore's grandson Sorin, which is actually a name that appears to have come to Romania from France, emigrated from Italy to Minnesota in 1951. This is a far cry from what I had been told and come to know for my entire life until the age of 28, that my grandfather Edgar’s family had emigrated from the island of Ireland before the American Revolutionary War of 1775 (although like many immigrant families married almost exclusively among their own ethnic group until the World Wars, which combined with the Great Depression in the interim, had a simultaneously unifying and breaking down effect of numerous ethnic groups and ethnic identity in America). In this case, Edgar’s family for a very long time, married other Protestant Irish, or Scots-Irish, just about exclusively.

I can remember when Edgar died, or rather, when he was lying on his deathbed, and my mother told me to give him a kiss and a hug goodbye, and I just froze. As if I could just pretend I don’t exist, and she would forget. He smelled, he was gaunt, his face had this prickly stubble, pronounced even worse due to how thin he was, and I could not and cannot recall him ever giving me a hug, not like he cared about me, not like how my great grandfather Bill Olsen would hug me. And so when my mother put her hand on my shoulder and told me again, I still didn’t move. Not even when my oldest sister pushed my back towards the bedside, which was only a couple feet away at that point. I regret nothing. Especially now.

I was 8 years old, and 9 months prior my dad had had a debilitating stroke, which left him in a coma for months, and then subsequently incapable of wiping his own ass, muttering unintelligibly, unable to recognize his own wife and children. Edgar died 18 years, to the day, after his only biological son Ron. Some of my siblings and I think he found out he wasn’t Kyle’s biological father. Unconsciously at the very least, I’m sure he thought this since Kyle was young. He certainly treated his step son abysmally at times, while his biological son was doted on.

If Edgar found out, he certainly never told anyone else in his immediate family. Upon the death of his wife Audrey in 1983, he didn’t tell Audrey’s biological son Kyle that his own mother had died for three days, and then locked Kyle and his wife and kids outside of the house when Kyle came by to grieve with and comfort the man he knew as his father. It seems likely, considering other things we know, that Audrey told Edgar on her deathbed, that, at the very least, Kyle wasn’t his biological son.

Whether or not Edgar knew, Audrey certainly did. By all accounts, she may very well have even planned Kyle’s birth, with this Italian educated doctor, of Latin-Greek descent, who had fled the Soviet grip on his homeland. Some part of Romania was under some form of Soviet occupation from 1940-1958, and the influence became strong enough that Ceausescu would be installed a few years later, and the Iron Curtain wouldn’t fall til 1989.

My father had a fascination with specifically Greek cultural milieu, mythology, history, food, religion, etc. that really didn’t touch the obvious corollary or counterpart of the Italian Peninsula and the Roman Empire as administered from there. I don’t recall him ever having any interest in Romania either.

The first time I really looked into the place, some of the first results that came up were of the infamous Ceausescu regime orphanages, and pictures and video footage of children lying in their own piss and shit and filth. Not reassuring.

Glad I can say I have no reason to believe my direct biological paternal family spent more than 75 years there.